[21] This has been termed "the crime of the century," but it
was in strict accordance with what the rest of Europe had attempted to
do to Austria and then to Prussia. Only, the first two victims had
proved unexpectedly capable of resistance, the third was more shrewdly
selected. Kindly benevolent despotism had also a voice in the matter,
for Poland was wretchedly misgoverned, a source of constant danger to
herself and to her neighbors. It was really a kindness, as those
neighbors explained, to relieve her of half her territories. So well
were their successors of the next generation pleased with the results,
that they took each another slice, and then, fully convinced of the
ancestral wisdom and good-will, divided what was left.

SHADOW OF COMING CHANGES

The new cynicism and philosophy which was thus spreading even among
monarchs, was soon destined to have most explosive results. It found
expression first in a further revolt against the dominion of the Roman
Church. Most of the sovereigns joined in a determined attack against the
Jesuits, the enthusiastic and devoted priests who had become the
mainstay of the papal power. After a long resistance, the Jesuits
succumbed; their order was abolished by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.

The next startling symptom of the changing times was the rapid literary
development of Germany. Its young men had been left free to think and
talk. Frederick half contemptuously declared that his people might
believe what nonsense they pleased so long as they remained orderly. The
poet Lessing by his books roused the ancient spirit of liberty, long
dormant in the German mind. Goethe and Schiller became the foremost of a
crowd of younger men whose revolt at first took the form of an
extravagant devotion to romance as opposed to the dull workaday world
about them.[22] Pestalozzi, a Swiss, conceived the idea of reforming the
world through its children, encouraging the little ones by constant,
loving example to develop all the strength and goodness that was in
them.[23]

Yet the first open defiance given to despotism by the fast-growing
spirit of freedom came not from Europe but from America; was a revolt
not against the lazy tyranny in France or the kindly tyranny of Eastern
Europe, but against the constitutional government of England. When the
French minister signed the treaty surrendering to England all his
country's possessions in America he justified himself with a well-turned
phrase, "I give